Wanting Things is OK

It is OK to want things. Desire is like a horse we ride. Or that we have hooked up to a buggy or something. It is the energy that moves us places. There is a weird idea that being spiritual means trying to avoid having desires, or suppress the desires you have.

There is also a weird idea that being good means only doing what God wants you to do. Truely speaking, God, as Atma, is neutral, and doesn't really want anything. I got confused by this, and sat still, waiting to be told what to do by the Atma. But even the personal God doesn't want to tell you what to do. The process of growing up spiritually involves recognizing that you are the Son of God, and ultimately that you are God. Relying on external authority, though perhaps a useful set of training wheels, is not to be idealized. God has placed within your own heart all that he wants for you, as the desires already within you.

Our job is to listen to our own heart, our own desires, and when one comes up, check it against the voice of conscience (I should really do a post just on conscience). Or you might say, check it against the Atma. As long as it does not go against that internal voice, then it's ok to do. Enjoy. If it does go against it, then yeah, you should try and find a way to redirect it (still workn' on how to do that without unhealthy suppression stuff. results mixed but promising. Fully committing to following your sense of rightness makes it easier, and offering yourself, ahead of time, a list of alternative things, that satisfy the same basic craving but are ok with your own sense of rightness, seem to help. Like having healthy snacks around so you don't eat junk food.)

It's ok to do things just because you want to do them. Sometimes we get impulses from we don't know where, that feel like imperatives. And they always seem to be good ideas, and perhaps important to our overall life plan. I don't know. But those are the exceptions.

And if you are someone life me, who maybe externalizes my desires too much, "tell me what I should want to do." Then it's important to strengthen your desire muscles by doing things you want to do, that are not harmful to yourself. This strengthens your desire muscles, and those are the muscles that pull you through difficult tasks.

The other element of that, which pulls you through long-term difficult tasks, is staying connected to your purpose. What bigger things do you want in life? Long term goals, or dreams. Visions of your future that make you happy to think about. I suggest dreaming big, not letting possibility limit what you dream about. Then remind yourself of where you are and where you want to go, and at least the one next step that will take you closer to that. Keeping those in mind
A) keep us on track towards what we want and
B) keep us moving through the difficult stuff and still feeling good about what we're working on, even if day to day it seems unimportant.


Personally, I avoided wanting things because when I wanted things, I really wanted them, and when I didn't get them, I felt really, really bad about myself. It's a little difficult to get the hang of, but the Bhagavad-Gita suggests a solution to this: Do your action, but think of it as an affection offering to your Higher Power. If it's for yourself, it's for the Atma that is who you really are. If it's for someone else, it's for their Atma, the God that is at the core of who they are. It's not your job to worry about whether your action is successful or not. You do your best, doing what you know to be right, or doing something you want to do and know isn't wrong, and trust that God will take care of the outcome, and if you don't succeed, there's a good reason for that. (And maybe it's just teaching you persistance so your next job is just to try again.)


-Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves, says Mary Oliver.
-Hold the reins and use your discrimination to decide where your senses/horses take you, says Krishna.

These are complementary bits of advice, not opposing. Think again of the riding a horse analogy. Be loving and kind to your horse/desire body. Let it graze when it's hungry and drink when it's thirsty, give it a nice luxurious rub down after a hard day's work. But when you're riding, if you've got somewhere you want to go, direct the horse, and keep it from veering off course. Otherwise you'll never get there. In charge, but kind.

The Most Important Thing: Oranges, Miricles, and Magic

I just ate an orange at a friends house that had more seeds in it than any I have eaten in working memory. 90% of the time I spent eating it was maneuvering the seeds out of my mouth. In thinking about this, I suddenly created/was struck by a new joke. Here it is:

At what point did I realize my oranges were inferior to other oranges?

When I noticed they had been superseded.

I feel like I just witnessed the birth of a star. I know stand-up comedians make up jokes all the time, but I guess I always thought of jokes as a static resource, something to be discovered and memorized. I knew someone must have made them up, but perhaps the were cognized by ancient sages or placed conspicuously by aliens where we would find them. But now I have seen one spring into being in my very own cranium. And I still have no idea how they are made. It just appeared there. This is why people make up stories about muses and divine inspiration. You can't explain or understand where brilliant ideas come from. One moment they're not in your awareness, the next they are.

Certainly the environment contributed, but that's no excuse. The environment is always contributing. Perhaps you can up the odds by certain actions, but ultimately, whether you come up with something unexpected and new, or not, is up to some mysterious working outside our conscious awareness.

Speaking of mysterious workings, this orange was eaten at a friends apartment. A very special apartment, and a very unusual friend. The apartment is littered with the aftermath of miracles. Paintings of Tibetan gods and goddesses and saints with sacred white ash growing on them, looking a bit like bread mold or frost on windows, organically growing out in small circles. There’s some on a picture of the Dalai Llama, and a few other saints. The largest picture also has a dark stain down the front of the glass, starting at the saint's heart. At one time, gallons of some substance that smelled and tasted like rose flavored honey was coming seemingly out of thin air, manifesting on the chest/heart area and flowing down, where the surprised owners of the picture put a pie tin underneath the picture to collect it and keep it from getting all over the table and floor. These friends don't advertise these occurrences. In fact they sometimes hide the pictures when they have people over who they don’t want to have to explain what happend (like their business partners.)

If you visited their apartment you probably wouldn't even think to ask about the light dusting of ash on some of the pictures or the weird stain on the big one and they don’t mention it unless someone else brings it up. You would just be put at ease by their hospitality, easy humor, and simple, unassuming manner. Then they would try to feed you delicious food and that would probably be the night. Maybe they’d ask if you wanted to meditate together, if you were obviously into that kind of stuff. That would probably be all you knew of them, unless you already knew to ask specific questions.

But if you start asking them about stories, they can keep you up all night, with one physical impossibility after the other. Not embellished, not long in the telling. About the countless miracles that happened, mysteriously, wondrously, for years, and then mostly stopped. About dreams predicting things that happened the next day. (“You’ll get the money you need for your project” “what? A million dollars is just going to fall into my lap?” The next day: *ring ring* “Hey Mary, we’ve got a backer and we’re set with the money now.”) And on and on, as long as you wanted to stay.

And they are not the only ones. I have heard person after person tell me more and more of these things. Reliable witnesses. Normal people, normal lives and jobs. Good people. Friendly, humble, simple. They don’t talk about the miracles unless someone asks.

This is an uncommon thing that I have been witness to. Like the birth of a joke, or a star. First, to be seeing the echo's of miracles, the stories of people who've witnessed things beyond sketchy and subjective feelings, phenomena that might be attributed to the subconscious or the placebo effect. This is not, “I he waved his hands over me and told me he was doing energy and then I kinda felt better.” or even “he waved his hands and along with traditional medicine, I got better from my serious illness.” This is gallons of something like honey coming from nowhere. Sacred ash completely covering pictures. People coming out of comas, being raised from the dead, cured of incurable cancer riddling their bodies with a touch.

Either there is a conspiracy of probably tens of thousands of sociopathic, expert liars, lying in wait, as sleeper agents, going about normal uneventful lives full of spiritual practice, unrecognized selfless service to those in need, and simple, un-ostentatious lives so they can give credibility to their mutually supporting lies when the rare curious spiritual seeker manages to find out their identity from other kind, simple, moral, service oriented people. All for the nefarious sociopathic purpose of occasionally instilling a little bit more faith in God to those rare few persistent seekers. For zero materialistic or social gain (always denying being personally responsible for the occurrences, or specially ‘good’ and deserving of them.)

I suppose you could play the mass hallucination card? Or they all have split personalities, one of which sets up elaborate fake miracles under the noses of their families?

At some point a while back, I realized that not believing this huge number of reliable sources would be denial and paranoia and irrationality on a massive scale. Honestly, it was quite a while back that I realized, at least logically and rationaly, that the world worked in ways people would call miraculous or magical. But after all this additional reinforcment, it’s finally sunk in to an emotional gut level realization.

The thing about this that is both delicious as rose-flavored honey and frustrating as slow drivers in front of you when you're late for work, is that the Dresden Files is right.

The Dresden Files is an urban fantasy novel series, and one of the things frequently mentioned, is that magic and the supernatural is all around us, but people don't know about it because they don't believe in it, so when they see it, they just explain it away as something else. Coincidence, hallucination, or a weird memory.

The reality seems to be, very clearly, that there is magic in this world, honest to goodness magic as magic as anything you've read. The really flashy stuff is way less common than in most of the books and seems to work differently that the imaginary magic systems (though sometimes not so different). And absolutely there is much, much more fake stuff. And there is some very confusing stuff that seems to straddle the line between fake, placebo effect, and something beyond what science currently can explain. I can usually tell myself when to wake up. I can often think myself out of being sick. Occasionally, in deep meditation, I know things and there’s no good explanation of how. I can meditate and feel a deep sense of joy and peace, for seemingly no reason. This stuff lies in a fuzzy realm that can maybe be explained by science, but sometimes it feels like the scientific explanation is getting a bit weak. Or starting to sound very unscientific.

But reliable second and first hand experiences seem to clearly verify that sacred substances can manifest on pictures, people can levitate, supernatural beings exist, life doesn't end when the body stops working, and there is an Omni-everything, deeply loving being that is intelligent and could rightly be called the Creator.

I'm super foggy on how it works, but you can develop what could easily be called, and viewed as, superpowers, or magic, and you can achieve something incredible as the culmination of human existence on earth, and it's called a lot of different things, but it's definitely worth the trip.

I wanted to be here for a long, long time. I wanted my proof. I wanted assurance. I wanted to know if magic, of the stories of saints, were real. I was a long haul, and I had to take several careful leaps of faith. And exert a tremendous amount of effort and persistence in the face of disappointing results. But I'm here now. I have my proof, beyond any reasonable doubt. And I would love to tell my about it, but, it seems that almost none of them belive me.

I have so many friends, interested in fantasy novels, gaming, star wars, etc., who would be ecstatic to know that the world is magical beyond anything they'd dared to hope. I've tried to tell them about what I’ve seen, but, though they put up with my eccentricities because they love me, perhaps even accepted that what I’m saying might be true, I wasn’t able to convey my experience. I wasn’t able to make them get up and dance for joy. Which is what I assume would happen if people realized deep down that the world is super magical.

Perhaps that is right and good. Perhaps you should not belive incredible things that go against your previous understanding of reality, on the say so of another person. Perhaps it’s even important that you yourself go through a long arduous journey of searching, repeatedly finding false leads and fake magic, before getting to step across that threshold. Perhaps the value of that knowledge requires you pay for it in sweat and dedication.

But imagine: you’ve just run into a wizard. They’ve told you with a wink that Harry Potter is basically true, and they they’ve whipped out a wand and transmogrified a lamp into a duck and back again. They take you home to a place like the Weasley's house for dinner, complete with family ghost, self sweeping brooms, and kits flying around the yard playing tag. You ask if it’s alright to tell your friends and the wizard says you’re free to try, with a little wink, and so you go home and tell your friends what happened to you. And they smile and nod and say that’s very interesting. None of them even ask to be introduced to the wizard. You always assumed those books about how magic is real and people just generally choose not to see it are a bunch of hooey, and yet, it seems like if your friends actually believed you, they would be going a bit crazier with excitement.

You look at your friend Pete. He owns all the Harry Potter books and knows all the lore, he plays Harry Potter role playing games. You can imagine him foaming at the mouth with joy to discover it is basically all real. But he doesn’t believe you. Oh how you wish you could give him that gift of knowing, but alas, you are not a wizard yourself. You cannot show, only tell.

One of my nightmares: I know something important, I’m trying to warn people, but nobody believes me, so something horrible happens.

This reminds me of a game I played last night called “The Resistance” where some of the players were secretly spies trying to sabotage the mission. As the leader went around the circle interviewing each player to hear their pitch why they should be on the mission, and why he should trust them, I said, “I am a spy. You shouldn’t trust me” Everyone laughed. I don’t know how many people believed me. I decided I would be an honest spy, so I simply did not lie for the whole game. That one guy actually ended up trusting me. (And I did not betray him or my word.)

In fact, the final round that determined who would win the game, ended up having me as the leader who chose the team. I told people point blank, that I would vote for the mission to succeed, and would let them determine who else was on the team, so they had an actual shot of not failing. But I think they didn’t believe me, and so most just gave up and didn’t even try to pick the non-spies. We failed the final mission. (So I guess I won, as a spy?)

I understand why most of the players didn’t trust me. And why people don’t just take my word that the world is totally different than most people believe. If the situation was reversed, I probably wouldn’t believe me either. But I feel kind of bad. Like I’m just not going about explaining it right. Like if I was just a bit smarter, I could convince people through simple obvious rational explanation. And then Pete could realize all his dreams have already come true, and if he really wants too, and works hard, he too can be a wizard.

That seems like a pretty awesome gift to give.

The most important thing about all this, though, is not the magic. Not the super-powers, not the fact that fantasy books are pale shadows of the fantastic-beyond-human-comprehension truth. No. The most important thing is what this means.

It means there are beings of truth and light. Not magicians or shamans or wizards, which are also real, (sometimes), but sages and saints and avatars. Beings that can lift up a mountain on their little finger, or create a mini-universe with a thought, or live forever, or have access to seemingly any information they want or do basically anything. And who are contented within themselves, and need and want nothing from anyone. They just want to see others happy. The most important thing, is that they exist, and what these beings of varying levels of omniscience say.

They say love all equally and unconditionally, and serve everyone without expectation of reward. They say cultivate good character and do good deeds. They say listen to your conscience and do your duty, with heart. They say seek the kingdom of heaven within, because realization of who you truly are is the greatest achievement in life. Far greater than any amount of super-powers (This from one of the more superhero-esk and magical personalities.) They say there is only one ultimate Truth, that is what is meant by the word “God,” and all paths, religions, names, and visions of it/him/her are fine, and all are referring to that same One thing. And you don’t even have to talk about it as God or name it at all, but it is the place you end up when you either seek the ultimate, or seek the truth of who and what you really are. They say it’s nature is Love, and Truth. (And if someone does something in the name of God that is not love and truth, it’s coming from that person, not from God.)

 

That's it. And in a world where monkeys with the intelligence of humans can grow to the size of a mountain and fly through the air like superman, that (not the super-monkeys) is what is really important. And that’s not because super-monkeys (I wonder how Hanuman feels about being called Super-Monkey?) are normal and ho-hum. Super-monkeys and wizards and gods and legendary heros are AWESOME. But this other, seemingly less flashy stuff, is actually even MORE awesome.

Your effort is not wasted. The goal exists. Not a watered down version of it. A full blown version of it. More significant that the ability to literally move mountains. So go for it full throttle. Or don’t. But know it’s there, waiting for you whenever you decide 100% to go for it.

Wizards are real, Pete, and you can be one. Though you can also be God, which, y’know, sounds even better. And doesn’t preclude being a wizard as well.

I suppose I should caveat: though all this is true, it's also true that there is LOTS of fake stuff and people who don't know what they're talking about and people who kind of know what they're talking about and etc. You must use your discrimination and common sense at all times or you're going to get turned around in circles or sent up a dead end.

Sorry. No giving over responsibility for your life to someone else. But I’ve found if I listen to my inner compass in the silence of my own heart with deep yearning and openness, that the inner wisdom will always give me the help and guidance I need. And I’ve heard similar reports from many other people.

I'm thinking now of something one of my teachers said. "I don't ask you to believe me. I just ask you to prove me right or prove me wrong." Perhaps it's not possible to really get, deep down, that magic is real, just from some words on a page. Maybe that's asking for too much. But what I can give is this: I searched for it, and I found it. You can too, though it may be a long journey, and probably many who start looking will end up giving up before the end. I'm happy to give suggestions for places to look, and maybe it can be a shorter journey for you. 

But the other stuff I mentioned, about love and seeking within, is much more important, so if you're already fully committed to that, and you don't care that much about the magic, then don't waste your time. In my mind the only real use of this knowledge is to strengthen faith and resolve for the great work necessary to realize who you always have been.

A simple rainy night of early summer

I hear the susurrus of the soft rain sweeping through my slightly open window like the cool clean air that comes with it. I feel purified, holy. The breeze caresses me and it is beauty incarnate touching my skin, flowing into my body through the nose, seeping in my depths infusing me with its pulsing love. Cooling my overheated mind with peace.

I never wish to die, but this is one of those moments where life feels so full that it would not be that much of a fight if he came for me now. How could I refuse when my life was so full, gifted beyond any reason or comprehension. A gift the size of the universe.

Deep as the starry sky I exist to expand until I am infinite and can fully appreciate this that I have, right now. Not have, not own. It is me. It is the gift of my very essence, of what I am. As this particular, very specific beauty, which has no limit to the depth that it can be appreciated. And yet it is just one of infinite configurations of beauty that exist.  The gift is too big and I cannot see all of it, taste all of it, but I surrender as best I can, relax so I can spread out like an unobserved quantum waveform and soak in the maximum.

That is all words can convey for now. It is good.


[This was written many months ago, likely more than a year back. It just stayed in the draft folder till tonight, when I wanted to check something off my to-do list. Enjoy ^_^]